Stockholm Center for International Law and Justice invites you to a seminar with:
Professor David Schneiderman
on the topic
Investment arbitration as constitutional law:
constitutional analogies, linkages, and absences
This chapter on which this presentation is based (prepared for the Oxford Handbook on Arbitration), examines analogies and linkages between investment arbitration and judicial review under national constitutions. The implications of constitutional analogizing are examined from both a functional and normative point of view. In the first part, two modes of constitutional analogizing are identified: a ‘project’ mode is intended to fortify legitimacy in investment arbitration while a ‘critical’ mode prompts doubts and heightens legitimacy concerns. The second part evaluates the performance of investment arbitrators in selected disputes where tribunals have directly engaged with national constitutional law in the course of issuing reasons. The focus in on how tribunals handle interpretation of constitutional texts and high court rulings as law applicable or relevant to an investment dispute. The chapter concludes by arguing that investment arbitration will continue to be of doubtful legitimacy so long as investment arbitration is characterized as performing constitution-like functions.
David Schneiderman is Professor of Law and Political Science (courtesy) at the University of Toronto where he teaches courses on Canadian and US constitutional law and on international investment law. He is the author of over 80 articles and book chapters and, in addition, the author or editor of twelve books, including Constitutionalizing Economic Globalization: Investment Rules and Democracy’s Promise (Cambridge 2008), Resisting Economic Globalization: Critical Theory and International Investment Law (Palgrave 2013), and Red, White and Kind of Blue? The Conservatives and the Americanization of Canadian Constitutional Culture (Toronto 2015). He is currently a senior fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation and on the editorial board of the Journal of International Dispute Settlement.